


the wyoming case

by tusktooth



Series: pride 2020 [7]
Category: Red White & Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston
Genre: Gen, Murder, Mystery, Private Investigators, Suicide mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2020-06-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:06:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24809752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tusktooth/pseuds/tusktooth
Summary: When three university students go missing and the police refuse to take the case seriously, one of their friends hires Alex and Nora to find them.
Relationships: Alex Claremont-Diaz & Nora Holleran
Series: pride 2020 [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1772290
Kudos: 10





	the wyoming case

**Author's Note:**

> I should make a series called fics that are good and i loved writing but probably won't get any attention because they're too self-indulgent. oh well, this fic pops off anyway!!! I love Alex and Nora's friendship dynamic and I thought they'd have an interesting dynamic working together on a case as "private bis". I realize that technically this can be read as canon-compliant which is wild but I wrote it as if the white house trio existed but hadn't been so wildly popular that just anyone would recognize them. This is set at my own school and it shows I even made lowkey specific references to stuff but it won't impact the reading experience lmao.  
> I will say this is wild but I planned out my pride calendar a month ago and put this on this date and, as it turned out, it has been exactly one year since I started reading rwrb for the first time.  
> ALSO!!!! This is entirely unrelated but today is Juneteenth so if you have the time to read this fic, you probably have a few moments to [read about Juneteenth](https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/historical-legacy-juneteenth) which I highly recommend, especially if you're an American, because it's an important date in our history that they don't typically teach you about in school.  
> [main tumblr](http://adaine.tumblr.com/)  
> [lit tumblr](http://bistarkov.tumblr.com/)

heir “I just got a text from Madam President herself,” Alex told Nora as she flew down I-80, speeding even though it was windy, snowy, and they were driving next to a fucking cliff. He had no intention of dying in eastern Wyoming but Nora, it seemed, didn’t have the same reservations.

She snorted. “Alex, you can just call her mom. She didn’t birth you and raise you for you to not call her mom. I’m pretty sure June and Alex’s mom is a more important title to her than President of the United States. Besides, we’re private investigators so she can’t give us orders. Well, except for the fact that she’s your mom so I guess she can give  _ you _ orders.”

He tried to punch her in the arm but she swatted it away so he crossed his arms instead. “Am I not allowed to make jokes anymore?”

“I didn’t say that,” Nora replied. “Just don’t make any more stupid ones, if you can help it.”

“I’ve never made a stupid joke in my life,” he protested.

“Your whole life is a stupid joke.”

“That’s it, Nora,” he said, falling dramatically back in his seat. “That was the final burn. You’ve killed me?”

Nora just rolled her eyes. “If only I could be so lucky. Now, what did your mom say?”

“She said to drive safe and call when we get there,” he told her. “I told her that I’ll definitely call but I can’t promise anything about safe driving because you’re at the wheel and don’t have any qualms with driving so fast that you might veer off the road and go flying into a cliff.”

“Stop being so dramatic. I’ve got it all under control,” she replied. “If you drove the whole way, we’d never get there.”

“Demon.”

She stuck out her tongue and cranked up the music.

Not long after, they had emerged through the hills and their destination slowly appeared below the setting sun. Laramie, Wyoming wasn’t a big city by any means but it was one of the larger cities in Wyoming and the only one that had a four-year university. If they hadn’t been driving through Nebraska for the past day, a small city in the middle of absolutely nothing might appear strange but in the West, it was the norm.

“Do you think they have any luxury hotels here?” Alex asked as Nora drove onto the exit ramp.

“Nope,” she replied. “But they do have a Hilton right next to the university, which is where I booked us for the next couple of nights. I hope an indoor pool is luxurious enough for a work trip.”

“It’ll have to do, I guess,” he said with a sigh. Once you’d lived in the White House for a few years, you got used to being pampered. After a few days on the road, he craved the luxury treatment again.

“It’ll have to do?” she echoed. “Alex, this is a pro-bono case.”

He straightened up in his seat. “We aren’t getting paid?”

“We got hired by a college student,” she reminded him. “I mean, I asked anyway, but he didn’t have much to offer. Hopefully, it’ll help us build our reputation so we can get more paying cases.”

“This was a long drive for zero dollars,” he grumbled.

“I thought you’d be all over helping out someone who couldn’t afford to pay to hire someone,” she said.

“Well, yeah,” Alex replied. “But money is also pretty nice.”

* * *

The guy that had hired them or, more accurately had requested their help in exchange for no money, was an 18-year-old freshman named Jason. He was a tall gangly kid with dark brown skin and a bright smile who was on the school’s track team.

The case was like this: three kids had gone up to the mountains to do some skiing the previous weekend and never returned. Owen, Jason’s roommate, had brought his girlfriend, Marcy, and her roommate, Claudia, to the local mountain range, and a snowstorm struck while they were away, which closed the roads for a few days. He had expected to see them again once they reopened, assuming they were staying in the small town at the foot of the mountains, but they never came back to campus. The police had written it off as a few kids running away when the pressure got high during the middle of the semester, due to the roommate apparently having an alleged history with drugs, but Jason wasn’t convinced.

“So you think that they’re dead?” Nora asked him.

It was a possibility Alex had contemplated as well. It was quite possible that they were in the mountains when the storm hit and got snowed in their car or just stuck outside, dying from the cold or potentially starvation. God, he hoped they hadn’t eaten each other.

But the fact of the matter was that no bodies were uncovered as of now, and not for a lack of searching. More importantly, nobody had been able to find their car yet, which was what lent the most credibility to the police’s current theory.

“I think somebody killed them,” Jason said with a sigh. “But the police won’t listen to me. They think I’m just a dumb kid but I know my roommate. Things were going great for him here and just because Claudia smoked a little pot doesn’t mean that she’d want to run away!”

“They could have just gotten trapped in the storm,” Alex suggested.

Jason shook his head. “Look, Owen is the most outdoorsy kid I know. He spends literally every summer backpacking through Yellowstone. He knows how to take care of himself in the woods.”

“During a snowstorm?” Nora asked. “Without a tent? And they still haven’t found the car which isn’t exactly an easy thing to lose.”

“I wouldn’t have called you here if I didn’t know the police were wrong,” Jason said with a shake of his head. “I know I don’t have much to offer but you’ve already come all the way out here. I’m just asking you to look into it.”

Alex and Nora shared a look, one of two people that understand how the system can fail the people it doesn’t want to hear, and nodded.

Nora turned back to Jason. “Was Owen acting weird at all before he disappeared?”

He let out a sigh of relief. “Thank you for  _ finally _ asking that question. Yes. I tried to tell the police but they wouldn’t listen. He’s been acting super weird the past couple of weeks, sneaking around and stuff like that. He was worried about something with this trip to the extent that he got upset when I had to cancel to study.”

“Wait, you were supposed to go with?” Alex asked, a bit surprised. Because if they were running away and Jason was supposed to go with, shouldn’t they have filled him in on the details?

He nodded. “It was a double date situation. Owen has been relentlessly trying to pair me up with Claudia recently but she’s not exactly my type. I like guys, actually, but I’ve been keeping it on the down-low with Owen because he’s my roommate and we’re on the track team together. I didn’t want to freak him out before I knew how he’d feel about it.”

“Yeah, I feel that,” Alex replied as Nora hummed in agreement. “Was there anything in particular that he said to you that would indicate that he was like scared or something?”

“Not that I can think of,” Jason replied, stopping for a moment to think. “But he did seem pretty worried about this trip. He kept trying to get me to go and when it was clear that I wouldn’t, he tried to cancel it, even citing the weather as a reason not to go. They were supposed to be back before the storm hit and the girls were really excited to go. Marcy had never actually skied before and she was scheduled to take a class.”

“Do Marcy and Claudia have any other close friends that we might be able to talk to?” asked Nora. “You’ve been really helpful so far, but we need to see if they were acting weird at all before.”

“For sure,” he said with a nod. “I don’t know like super specifics as to who they hung out with but they were both in Tri Delta so you can probably check over at the house across the street.”

Nora closed the notebook that she was writing in. “Thank you, Jason. We’ll be in touch soon. Right now, we’ve got some sorority girls to chat with.”

* * *

The Tri Delta house was just across the street, as Jason has directed them. It was a pretty sizeable three-story house painted bright white with three dark green deltas painted near the roof like the triforce from the  _ Legend of Zelda _ . Between the bright color and the shoddy paint job, the exterior gave off almost a summer camp vibe.

Nora walked up to the front door and knocked firmly.

A girl with bright red hair and gray eyes answered, seeming confused to see the pair of them. “I think you’re at the wrong place. The Kappas are hosting the study event tonight. You can deliver the food there.”

“Do we look like delivery people?” Alex asked, looking down at his nice peacoat and at Nora’s leather jacket.

“Oh, I just assumed, sorry,” she said. “We don’t usually get a lot of strangers knocking at our door.”

“I’m Nora and this is Alex. We’re private investigators looking into the disappearance of Marcy Rodriguez and Claudia Evans,” she told the girl. “We just have a few questions for anyone who might know them.”

“I thought that they ran away,” she said with wide eyes.

“That’s the opinion of the police,” Alex replied with a nod. “We’ve been hired to figure out what really happened and to find them if they did run away.”

“Well, Marcy was my little so I guess I can talk to you,” she said hesitantly. “But we have to stay outside. I’m not supposed to bring any guys inside the house. Oh, and I’m Lia, by the way.”

“It’s like 10 degrees with the wind,” he informed her.

Lia shrugged. “It’s above zero, so no big deal, right?”

To Alex, a native Texan, it was very much a big deal but he decided not to make a show of it in front of Nora and this 20-year-old girl, mostly because Nora would tease him about it the entire ride back to DC.

Lia stepped out and closed the front door as Alex mourned the heat that was drifting out from the inside of the house.

“So, what do y’all need to know?” she asked.

Nora flipped her notepad open. “So Marcy and Claudia were both in your sorority, yes? Did they live in the house?”

She shook her head. “Freshmen don’t typically live in the house, especially not during their first semester. Besides, Claudia wouldn’t be able to live here anyway.”

Alex raised an eyebrow. “Why? Did she do something to get banned or something?”

“Oh, no, nothing dramatic,” Lia replied. “She’s not in the sorority at all, actually, she just hangs around at most of our stuff because she and Marcy are so close. I mean, she could have been in the sorority. As in, we fully picked her, but she couldn’t afford it so she had to drop last minute.”

“Jason, Marcy’s boyfriend’s roommate, said that she was in the sorority,” Nora told her. “Do you think Claudia had any reason to lie about that?”

“Maybe she was embarrassed?” Lia suggested. “I mean, plenty of students here don’t have the money to get involved with FSL but she was super excited about it so it was probably pretty hard. And like she paid the registration fee so that was $25 just down the drain.”

“Interesting,” Nora said as she jotted something down on her notepad. “And would you say that either of them were acting weird?”

“Honestly? Not really,” she replied with a shrug. “I mean Marcy said her boyfriend was acting a bit weird and she was scared he was gonna dump her but then he planned this big dramatic trip with both of their roommates so that she could learn how to ski and suddenly things were going to be perfect again. He’s kind of an ass but she’s convinced that he’s her soulmate. You know how freshmen are.”

Alex didn’t particularly know either way, as he hadn’t exactly had the typical college experience but if it was anything like his short-lived relationship with Nora on the campaign trail, he kind of got it.

“Do you think Marcy would want to run away?” he asked Lia. “Like the police wrote it off as such but was she struggling in any way?”

“I just assumed that she ran away with Owen because she loved him,” she replied. “Or at least she thinks that she does. Sometimes, when you feel so strongly for somebody, you’re willing to push everything aside to be with them.”

Alex smiled fondly at his own memories. “I know the feeling.”

“A bit sappy, if you ask me, but it is what it is, I guess,” she said. “If you think someone would try to hurt Marcy, I really don’t understand why. She was a really nice girl. Everyone here liked her and she was from this tiny town in Ohio so she didn’t exactly come here with any enemies or friends here when she started. She pretty much just had us, her boyfriend, and her roommate.”

“You’ve been a lot of help,” Nora told her, which wasn’t exactly true because the most valuable thing Alex got from this exchange was hopefully an increased tolerance to cold weather.

“Good luck,” Lia told them a nod as she opened the door again and slipped through it. “I really hope you find her.”

After the door shut, Nora turned to Alex with a shit-eating grin. “You’re freezing your balls off, aren’t you?”

“Nobody should be outside when it’s below freezing,” he snapped.

She just cackled as she started off toward the car.

* * *

They spent most of that evening calling around. Neither Marcy nor Owen’s parents reported anything in the way of weird behavior and both blamed the other’s child for their kid’s disappearance. Claudia’s mom said that they hadn’t spoken in a while but, based on the conversation that they had, it seemed clear that their relationship was a bit strained.

The ski lodge reported that they had, indeed, been there when they were supposed to and that Marcy had been present for her lesson so at least they knew that they made it out safely. The theory that they were trapped in the mountains when the snowstorm hit was gaining more and more weight.

The police were, as expected, absolutely no help. They were firm in their belief that they had run away despite all evidence to the contrary and painted them to be deviants, which clearly wasn’t the case. They told them that they were foolish for coming out here when Jason called and that he was just making shit up to cover for them in case they were to come back which Alex firmly didn’t believe to be true. Jason was a boy that genuinely cared about the safety of his friends, otherwise, he wouldn’t have called them to travel across the country to look for them.

Feeling like they were already at a bit of a dead-end, they decided to get up bright and early to drive out to the mountains the following morning and investigate the scene of the disappearance, which was technically a decently-sized mountain range and thus would very likely lead nowhere.

At the foot of the Snowy Mountains, there was a tiny town called Centennial with a population of fewer than 300 people. It was a cute town, though. There were a few small businesses and an elementary school in the downtown area, which was just a small stretch along the main highway, with a handful of houses scattered around it.

Finally, just a bit beyond the town, there was a small visitor’s center for the mountains with a car parked in the lot, hopefully, that of a ranger.

Nora pulled into the parking lot and they walked to the front door together, only to find that the place was only open from June through September.

“I suppose they don’t get much traffic during the winter,” Alex said with a sigh.

“Most of the roads are probably closed off most of the year. Some will probably be closed now,” she replied as she opened a small plastic box and pulled out a map. “Keep this. I can’t imagine that we’ll have that much service in there.”

“But I’m terrible with directions!”

“Fine,” she said, snatching the map back out of his hands. “You drive.”

It was probably for the best, knowing Nora’s tendency to speed. Flying through the icy mountains probably wasn’t the best idea, especially when three students had just gone missing in them.

“We still have data,” Nora said in surprise after he’d been driving for a few minutes. “You, my friend, just got a text.”

“It’s probably Henry texting me that he loves me,” he guessed.

“It is, indeed, Henry,” she answered, “but he just said that you’re an asshole for using his Spotify account to play country music. Apparently, you’ve fucked up his algorithm.”

“Listen, it is my right as the Prince’s boyfriend to swipe the royal Spotify family account to play some country bops now that my student account is void!”

“Country bops is an oxymoron,” Nora told him.

If Alex wasn’t too terrified to take one of his hands off the wheel, he would have slugged him in the arm. “Tell Henry to shove it and that I love him.”

Nora snorted. “Sure.”

He continued down the main roads until they hit where they were closed off and then they did small checks of the accessible side roads. No sign of a car or anything really, though the snowstorm likely would have covered most evidence. What’s more, the highway had actually been pretty much completely open before the snowstorm hit so if there was any evidence on the road beyond where it was blocked off, Alex and Nora didn’t have access to it.

Defeated, they rolled back into Centennial and pulled up to a small pizza place in town. It was surprisingly busy for a place in a town of 300, but he had a feeling that some of the patrons had driven in from Laramie, especially based on the small groups of college-aged kids scattered about.

Since they were a pair, they were still seated fairly quickly and a younger woman with choppy short black hair, blue eyes, and a bandaged hand came to take their order. “Welcome to Bear Tree. My name is Cassandra and I’ll be serving you tonight. Can I start y’all off with something to drink?”

“Just water, tha-” Alex started.

“Were you working here last Saturday?” Nora asked the woman.

She shook her head. “I’m actually a new hire. I just finished training yesterday so sorry, but no. Maybe you’re thinking of Beth? She’s a hostess here and has sort-of-similar hair to me, though she’s a fair bit older.”

“We’re private investigators, actually,” Nora explained. “I was just going to ask you if you’d seen anything weird here that day if you were here. A few kids from the university went missing a few days ago and we were hired to check it out.”

The waitress frowned. “Yeah, I heard about that. The police said they ran away but, well, the storm was pretty bad. I wouldn’t be surprised if the three of them got caught in it and stranded out there.”

“For their sake, let’s just hope that’s not the case,” Alex said with a sigh.

“A few of the locals are sitting at the bar,” she nodded behind her. “You should ask them if they saw anything weird. They know this town a bit better than I do. I’ll be right back with your waters.”

Cassandra walked away and the two of them nodded at each other before approaching the bar, where two older men and a middle-aged woman were sitting together and chatting.

“Excuse me,” Alex said as they got closer. “I’m Alex and this is Nora. We’re private investigators. Mind if we ask you guys a few questions?”

“Are we in trouble?” asked the bigger of the one, a heavyset white guy with a mustache to rival Doug Dimmadome and a hairline receding past his ears.

Nora shook her head. “We’re looking into the missing students and we just wanted to know if any of you guys noticed anything weird on Saturday since they would have passed through town.”

“Most of the time people stop here on their way back from their trips,” the woman, who had brown skin and a sharp nose told them. “I own the general store down the street and I don’t remember seeing any of those kids. Cops said they were runaways but the mountains can be dangerous in the snow, so who knows.”

It was surprising to Alex, and perhaps a bit eerie, that comparably the people in this town seemed more skeptical of the police ruling. Perhaps they just knew the dangers of the mountains better than some of the people over in Laramie but something still seemed a bit off.

“They still haven’t found the car,” Alex reminded them. “And when we checked it out today, we couldn’t see much. We weren’t allowed past where it’s blocked off due to snow but the police did searches out there last week.”

“Have you checked the side roads?” asked the second man, who was smaller than the first in every way except, of course, his full head of gray hair. Because of his outfit, Alex was able to gather that he was the town’s mailman, probably the only one or one of very few.

He nodded. “Yeah. We even parked in the side lots and did some walking around. The most interesting thing we saw were hoofprints.”

The bigger man laughed. “Not so interesting around these parts.”

“Well, did you check the ATV access roads?” the mailman asked them. “They’re dirt paths and aren’t really in great shape for regular cars but sometimes people are willing to take that risk for a bit of adventure when it’s not too icy.”

“They were all closed off because of the snow,” Nora muttered, pulling the map from her pocket. “Can you point them out to me on the map.”

He chuckled and asked the woman for a pen, which she pulled out of her purse and handed to him. He circled a few of the paths on the map and then paused for a moment before circling a few places that didn’t have a path.

“Not all the old ATV paths are listed because they don’t maintain ‘em anymore,” he explained. “So, when you go out that way, I would recommend parking your vehicle and hiking in if you’ve got the gear. If not, Kimama rents out some stuff from her store for a pretty fair price.”

She nodded. “I can get you snowshoes and heavier coats if you stop by tomorrow morning. I’ll even lend them out for free since it’s for a good cause. It’s not like anyone else is gonna rent that stuff out in the middle of the week.”

It was probably going to be another dead-end, just like today had been, but it was also probably something that had been overlooked by the police, at least the unmarked paths, so it was worth a shot.

“We’ll be by tomorrow morning to pick it up,” he told her. “Thank you so much.”

And then they returned to their table, new inspiration stirring within them.

* * *

Alex was excited to go back to the mountains the following morning. Partially because there was a possibility of uncovering new evidence but also because the pizza and pie they had eaten the night before were better than pretty much anything the White House kitchen had ever whipped up and he wanted to get more because who knew when he’d be in middle-of-nowhere, Wyoming again?

He had never snowshoed before and, to his surprise, Nora hadn’t either. But they were open to trying something new so they looked up the Wikihow article the night before and tried their best to remember it and, in all, Alex only fell on his ass four times, so he didn’t fare too badly. Nora, somehow the picture of grace even while awkwardly waddling in snowshoes, didn’t fall over once.

After finding absolutely nothing by the time they got to where the road was blocked off, it was time to call it quits. They’d just have to revisit the university and do more questioning. If someone had hurt them, then there was probably at least something back there that could clue them in. Maybe they needed to revisit Jason and Lia, as well as question more girls from the sorority.

“Wait, pull over,” Nora said, just as Alex was about to pull the car around.

He pointed to the blocked-off road ahead of them. “As much as you might want to break through the closed road sign, it’s not safe.”

“The next path is only half a mile down the road,” she told him. “It’s one of the ones that isn’t on the map.”

“Again, the road is  _ blocked off _ .”

“Let’s hike it,” she told him, throwing open the door to the passenger side without waiting for a response.

This was a terrible idea for numerous reasons:

  1. While it wasn’t currently 10 degrees as the wind had slightly lessened, it was still cold as sin and, with the daylight hours slipping away, would get much colder soon.
  2. Alex wasn’t sure he was allowed to park here and if he got a ticket he was going to be pissed.
  3. There was no service so, if one of them got hurt, they couldn’t call for help.
  4. Even if they could get help, they would be, at minimum, half a mile from where the road was blocked off, so it would be very difficult for said help to get to them.
  5. There was a good chance that they wouldn’t find jackshit so what was the point?



Unfortunately, the possibility of finding something,  _ anything _ , was nagging at the back of his mind, so he locked his car and pulled his snowshoes on before waddling after Nora and, embarrassingly, falling on his ass once again.

They had ventured through a lot of untouched snow throughout the day as they hiked down the ATV paths but this was different. Because the road had been closed off for a while, there were no cars to drive animals away so the number of animal tracks they walked past increased and occurred regardless of the highway’s proximity. They even saw particularly large hoofprints that seemed to belong to a moose but were a bit snowed over which hopefully meant the moose was no longer around. He didn’t want to get trampled by a massive animal today.

Nora had really gotten the hang of snowshoeing as the day went on so she was walking ahead of him, stopping every so often so that he could catch up. It wasn’t really fair that she seemed so unaffected by the altitude even though they had both come from pretty much sea level but there she was, perfectly fine as Alex gasped for air and guzzled water. He was simultaneously burning hot and freezing cold which was an entirely unpleasant experience.

Eventually, as they made their way down the path, Nora stumbled. He was about to point and laugh as an act of bitter revenge but he realized that her falling was not a case of difficulty with snowshoes but of uneven footing near the face of a cliff.

“Alex!” she yelped as she went down.

He dove and, despite being a bit behind he was able to grab her hand and help pull her back from the edge.

“Holy shit,” she gasped as they scrambled back a bit further from the edge together. “I think I almost peed myself a little. Thanks for saving my life, I guess.”

She probably would have been able to catch more than enough of the edge to pull herself back up, but he appreciated the praise anyway.

“Of course,” he replied. “Maybe now you’ll tease me less when I fall.”

“Well, that’s just too much to ask,” she said with a smile, but her expression changed to one of shock a moment later. “Fuck, Alex.”

“Did you lose a shoe or something?” he asked. “I’m sure you can just pay Kimama and you’ll be square.”

“No, look,” she told him, physically taking his head and turning it so he was looking down over the cliff.

“Yeah, it’s a beautiful view,” he replied with a shrug.

She tilted his head down a bit. “Look closer.”

And then he saw it, a glint of forest green peeking out from a snowbank on the bank of a river. “Is that?”

“It’s the car,” she said, with wide eyes. “We found it.”

“Can we get down there to investigate, do you think?” he asked her, looking down for potential paths to enter into the valley.

She shook her head. “I think we’d either need entrance past where the road is closed off or some serious climbing gear and skills.”

Alex groaned. “Do we really have to let the police in on this first?”

Nora patted him on the shoulder comfortingly. “Trust me, I’m just as unhappy with it as you are. Now let’s get some more pie.”

* * *

Given their previous behavior, Alex didn’t expect the police to tell them shit while the investigation was technically ongoing. They surprised him, however, when they called Nora the following morning to share the basics as a courtesy for them finding the car, which had contained the bodies.

While it was cold now and cold when they died, there had been a few warmer days in between which caused the bodies to somewhat decompose. What’s more, the car crashed into a river, which caused parts of the bodies to drift downstream, and they had also been picked apart by some of the animals that lived in the mountains. Still, they had identified the bodies of the three missing teens.

Marcy Rodriguez’s body was in the best shape and was, therefore, the easiest to identify. She had been sitting in the driver’s seat and had suffered the brunt of the crash but was also pinned into the car and was, therefore, more difficult for the animals to access.

Her boyfriend, Owen Ross, didn’t fare as well. He was sitting in the passenger’s seat, probably. His body was scattered and portions of it were still missing. They were waiting on dental records to double-check but they found remnants of a clearly male body on the scene that was likely him.

The final passenger, Claudia Evans, had been sitting in the back seat of the car and had likely been launched through the windshield upon impact. More of her body had been missing than anyone else, which made sense given her body was likely exposed more to the elements and the animals. She was also the easiest to identify. A partially decomposed finger was found on the scene in good enough shape to get a print, which matched that from an underage drinking charge she had gotten back in her home town of Rock Springs.

The police had likely already given him a call, but Nora and Alex still decided to pay a visit to Jason so that they could offer their condolences. It seemed that he had accepted the likelihood of their death before he even hired them, as he was the one who suggested that they were killed, but that still didn’t make losing a close friend any easier.

He met them in the lobby of the building and led them up to his room, waving off the RA that asked if he needed her support during this conversation.

“Thank you,” he told them. “You found them. I wish I had something to pay you. Maybe if I call my parents they can help me throw something together for y’all.”

Nora shook her head. “Don’t worry about money. We didn’t come over today to talk about that. We came to see how you were doing and tie up loose ends if you had any questions.”

“Did you find their killer yet?” he asked, which was not the question Alex had suspected.

“Jason,” he said. “They flew off an ice sideroad and died in a motor accident. It wasn’t anybody’s doing.”

“No,” he said with a shake of his head. “I don’t believe that.”

Nora set a comforting hand on his shoulder. “I know losing someone can be difficult. Denial is a perfectly natural-”

“Stop,” he said firmly, pushing her hand away. “I thought you two were better than to blindly believe what the cops tell you.”

“We’ve evaluated the evidence and-” he started.

“Just listen to me for one moment!” Jason shouted. “Have you really evaluated the evidence if you never stopped to think about why they were on that road in the first place? It was in the opposite direction of the school and it’s not even an actual roadway! The police said the place wasn’t even on the  _ maps _ . So why was my roommate, who has lived in northern Wyoming all his life and is well aware of the risks that snowfall in the mountains can have when driving, on a fucking closed ATV route during a snowstorm?”

And, well, Jason wasn’t wrong. It didn’t completely make sense for the reasons he had pointed out. Claudia was also a Wyoming native and would likely know it wasn’t safe. Marcy was the only one who might not fully understand the risk and she was the driver, but would she truly ignore the advice of the two people that she was closest to at school?

Jason sighed. “Maybe if I was there, I could have saved them.”

“Or you could have ended up in that car with them,” Nora said softly. “If you had, we would have never come out here and their bodies would still be missing.”

“We’ll stick around and ask some more questions,” Alex told him. “If anything comes out to clue us in that this might not have been an accident, we’ll hop on it, even if it’s the smallest thread of a lead. For now, it appears to us that it was an accident, maybe caused just by them getting lost trying to pull off the road until the storm passed.”

He nodded. “I just don’t want whoever did this to get away with it while my friends are painted like reckless idiots.”

“If someone killed him, we’ll find them,” Nora promised him.

Then they headed toward their only other potential lead, the sorority house across the street.

* * *

This time, they were able to assemble a group of girls from the sorority and actually gain access to the interior of the house. They were to be hosting a vigil in honor of the three students the following night and were hastily preparing for it but, since Alex and Nora had uncovered their lost sister, they were willing to hear out their questions and help in any way that they could.

It wasn’t the whole sorority, of course. A few of the girls had headed home after hearing the news to have the support of their parents as they coped with the loss of a girl they had known. Still, a decently sized group of mostly-identical white girls was assembled in the large living room, including a fair number of girls that didn’t live in the house.

The expressions on the girls’ faces were mixed. Some were clearly visibly upset at the loss of a dear friend. Others seemed confused, like perhaps they didn’t know these students all that well and now they were gone but they didn’t know how they were supposed to feel about it. A few had more neutral expressions, hard to read but maybe trying to push their own feelings aside. One thing was for certain, though. The stereotypical cheery sorority girl visage was nowhere to be seen.

“We want to start off by saying that we’re very sorry for your loss,” Nora told them. “While neither of us personally know what it’s like to lose a sister, we can only imagine how difficult and potentially confusing it must be for all of you and we’ll keep you in our thoughts as we hope for clarity to come to you in your processing of this loss so that you may come to not forget those that were lost, but live your lives in honor of those who cannot be here.”

A few girls started crying, but most nodded, seemingly pleased by Nora’s speech.

“We only have a couple of questions,” Alex told them. “And we’re open to talking to some of you individually if there are things that you might want to share that are more personal. I guess the first of those questions is were either of the girls acting weird before they left for their trip?”

“Excuse me?” said the girl that he recognized as Kyra, the president of the sorority, as she stood up angrily. “You’ve come here to what? Shame our lost sister?”

“Not at all!” he exclaimed. “We’re just trying to figure out-”  
“The gossip?” the girl asked. “Marcy died in a horrible accident. I won’t stand here and allowed her memory to be shamed because a few detectives are looking for ridiculous leads. I talked to the fucking cops. I know the details. Now, get out of our home.”

“We just want to cover all bases,” Nora defended. “Jason, who was-”

“It wasn’t a question,” Kyra snapped. “I will contact the police if you won’t get off our property in the next minute.”

She nodded and reached into her pocket before setting a business card on the table. “Very well. We’ll be leaving but, if any of you have anything that you’d like to share, please don’t hesitate to call us.”

“Thanks, but we won’t be needing to,” the girl said, pushing them toward the door.

Once it had slammed behind them and they had begun walking toward where the car was parked, Alex sighed. “That was entirely unpleasant.”

Nora shrugged. “I mean, it wasn’t great for us, but I think it made sense. She’s rightfully upset over the loss of a friend and has every right to remove us from her home. It’s not always easy to get information, but that’s why we do this, right? Because we’re smart enough to find it without forcing people into discomfort. We’re not cops, Alex.”

“Thank god for that,” he said with a sigh. “I just want to close this case and go, honestly. I don’t think it’s going to lead anywhere. I just wish I could give Jason the closure he needs.”

Nora squeezed his shoulder. “Sometimes closure is something that people need to find for themselves.”

As they reached the car, he noticed a girl racing toward him, one of the girls from the sorority. She was a tall girl with brown skin and long dark hair.

“Excuse me,” she said a bit out of breath. “Can we chat in the union real quick? I have stuff to share but, well, Kyra threw out your card. Also, this won’t get back to her, right?”

“Of course not,” Nora promised. “Let’s go inside- What’s your name?”

“Iris,” she replied.

The three of them walked into the union together and went down the stairs into a rec room that was mostly abandoned, as it was still barely midday. They slid into a booth together, away from any prying ears.

“So, Iris, what do you have for us?” he asked her.

“I know that Kyra makes it seem like we all loved Marcy and Claudia so much, but that isn’t necessarily true,” she told them. “First off, pretty much everyone hated Claudia. She wasn’t part of the group but always pretended like she was which was, honestly, kind of creepy and annoying. Kyra has snapped at Marcy about it a bunch of times and has had to kick Claudia out of meetings regularly.”

“That’s interesting,” Nora said. “We spoke to Lia before and she made it seem like Claudia was basically a sister to you all.”

“Maybe because she was missing, but Lia never really liked her either,” she replied. “And Claudia wasn’t good for Marcy anyway because she was always super jealous because she was in the sorority and had this boyfriend that was, if I’m going to be honest, always kind of shitty to her. Things came to a head a few weeks ago during parent’s weekend when Marcy’s mom came to visit all the way from Ohio and Claudia’s mom didn’t show, not that she was actually invited to the sorority events anyway. Claudia went crazy and like ripped up all her photos in their room. Nobody wants to speak bad about her, but Marcy was literally sleeping on the couch in the house for a week because she was so upset. And then all the girls in the house pretty much hated her too because it turns out she was a giant slob.”

“So, you think there was motive to kill them,” he surmised.

Iris sighed. “Look, I don’t want to cast a bad light onto any of my sisters. I don’t actually think that any of them are capable of murdering somebody. But if you’re asking if anyone would want to hurt them, the answer is a yes. Specifically, Kyra, who was the one that kicked Marcy out of the house after a week, citing that freshmen aren’t allowed to live there and that she’d have to pay more money for each further night she stayed there.”

“And the boyfriend?” Nora asked. “You mentioned he was shitty to her.”

She shrugged. “He was a cheater. She always made excuses for his behavior but it was so obvious to the rest of us that he was cheating. He would lie about where he was and dodge her calls and then when she’s about to confront him about it, he pulls out this big romantic gesture that he  _ tried to get out of _ ? He was seeing someone else, maybe right before they died.”

Alex and Nora shared a look. If they could find Owen’s mistress, then they might find their cheater.

“Do you think it could have been with anyone at the house?” he asked her.

“Honestly? I wouldn’t be surprised,” she replied. “He went to all our parties and stuff, so there were plenty of opportunities to meet someone.”

“Thank you, Iris,” Nora said with a smile. “You’ve been a bigger help than you can even imagine.”

“Of course,” she replied with a sad smile. “I just hope that y’all can find my sister.”

* * *

Going back to the sorority house was going to be a dead-end, as there was no chance that Kyra would let them in because they thought that she or one of her sisters might be a murderer. They tried Jason again and he admitted that the cheating made sense, but he didn’t have any further information. When they spoke to other members of the track team, it was clear that Owen was only really close to Jason.

Feeling as if they were out of luck, they went to the police and requested the release of his phone records, which was quickly denied.

In a last-ditch effort to get answers, Alex called his parents to see if they would be willing to divulge this information even though he thought that they would have a similar reaction to Kyra, as any record of Owen cheating on his girlfriend right before his death would tarnish his reputation. Surprisingly, they said that they’d be willing to contact their phone company to get them and that they’d email them over.

Alex and Nora were able to open the results together the following morning, the day that the vigil was to take place.

The results were surprisingly straight forward. He had expected this lead to go nowhere, as it was only call records and nobody actually called each other these days and he just as easily could be calling friends if he did use his phone. Except Owen had almost exclusively called one person besides Jason and Marcy in the past few weeks and his calls with this person had often taken place late at night.

Calls upon calls shared with Claudia Evans.

And then everything kind of clicked together. Maybe this wasn’t an accident but maybe it wasn’t a murder either, at least not exclusively.

“Do you think-” he said quietly, breath caught in his throat.

Nora frowned but nodded. “If he told her the truth, she must have been so upset. And to be in that car with the people that she had trusted most but been so utterly betrayed by?”

“Yeah,” he replied.

She nodded again.

“Should we tell everyone now?” he asked her.

Nora paused to think for a moment but shook her head. “Let’s wait until after the vigil. They should be able to mourn them before the truth comes out. I don’t want anyone to think poorly of them at a celebration of the lives that they lived.”  
“Okay,” he said with a nod. It was the right decision, really. People should be able to say goodbye first.

* * *

The vigil took place in the Tri Delta house. Originally, they had hoped that it would warm up enough to do it on the quad but there was still a thin layer of snow on the ground. A church was out of the question as the group was of a mixed religious background and it would be disrespectful.

Kyra allowed them into the house again, apologizing for her brashness the day before and thanking them for their attendance.

The setup was beautiful. The living room had been transformed, large pictures of all three students hanging on the wall as a row of candles sat on the floor beneath them. Some of Marcy’s sorority sisters were handing out more candles to the guests, who would take them and take a seat in one of the folding chairs set up in rows facing the photos.

As they took their seats, Alex examined the pictures more closely, upset to know what had happened to them. Owen’s bright smile as he held up a particularly large fish that he had caught. Marcy at her high school graduation. Claudia’s photo was much more grainy, probably pulled from a phone, and showed a selfie of a beautiful girl with long black hair and bright blue eyes.

His attention stuck on that picture longer than the others. Something about her seemed familiar, like he had seen her before.

After a moment, the final piece snapped into place. The waitress at the pizza place in Centennial looked a lot like that girl, albeit with less makeup and shorter hair that looked like it might have been hastily cut, though he had initially thought that to be a fashion choice. She had been new and started at the restaurant just after they went missing. Her hand had been bandaged, perhaps because she had cut off her own finger and left it at the crime scene, knowing that it could be used to identify her with ease. And she’d led them to the locals that told them about the ATV routes, probably because she knew finding the bodies would be the only thing that would get them to stop searching for kids that hadn’t run away. This wasn’t an act of sadness, but one of bitter jealousy and revenge.

“ _ Nora _ ,” he hissed into her ear. “I know who killed them.”

She raised an eyebrow before whispering back. “We already know it was Marcy.”

He shook his head. “Wrong. It was Claudia. Look at her picture and tell me she doesn’t remind you of anyone.”

Nora fixed her gaze on the picture and after a few moments, her eyes widened. “Cassandra? The waitress?”

“I have no idea how you remembered her name, but yes.”

She grabbed his arm and pulled him out of his chair. “We have to go, now. She might bolt after the vigil, once it well and truly looks like this has all passed.”

“Is it okay to walk out on a vigil?” he asked.

“Only when you’re honoring the dead and exposing the liar,” she replied. “We do this now for Marcy and Owen so that they don’t get laid to rest while their killer walks free.”

“Their actual funerals aren’t even for a few days.”

She shrugged. “I mean, whatever. Now, let’s go catch the killer!”

An elderly woman gave them a dirty look as they rushed out of the building and toward the car.

* * *

Claudia confessed pretty much right away. What choice did she have when everything matched up so obviously? She was literally missing the only body part of hers that was found in the scene.

It had been like this: Owen and Claudia had been together for a while behind Marcy’s back, a relationship that he had initiated, but he had recently broken things off with her, hence why he was aggressively trying to pair her with Jason. He intended to use this trip to tell Marcy the truth and, knowing that it would take away the last person that truly cared for her, Claudia decided to take things into her own hands in the worst way possible. She had knocked them unconscious and threw the car into drive, sending it off the cliff into the valley. Since this was before the storm hit, she was able to run down the road a bit and access the path that led down into the valley and modify the crime scene to her liking. She could have easily died there, out in the snow, but a truck picked her up on the way into town, not knowing the girl in his truck was not the victim of a vehicle accident, but a murderer.

When they conveyed this to Jason he seemed more at peace.

“Thank you,” he told them. “For listening to me when nobody else cared for my opinion. This doesn’t make things easier, necessarily, but I’m glad I know what happened and I’m glad she’s behind bars.”

“You’re a hero, Jason,” he said. “If you hadn’t called us and been so insistent about it, then she’d walk free and their bodies might still be missing.”

Nora nodded in agreement. “You’re a good kid, a  _ brave _ kid. We’re better for having met you.”

He smiled softly. “Thanks.”

“So, what now?” Alex asked. “Are you staying at school?”

“I think so, eventually,” Jason replied. “I’m going home tomorrow for the rest of the term. I don’t know if I’ll come back in January or September, but I do want to be here again. Just not in the dorms, probably.”

“Maybe that’s for the best,” Nora agreed. “It can be hard to move on without new scenery.”

“I think I’ll be more open when I come back,” Jason said. “It just kind of sucks that my best friend passed without knowing who I truly was. I’m not ashamed of the person that I am, and if this has taught me anything, it’s that being forthright from the beginning is very important.”

“As long as it’s safe, being you is the best way to be,” he said with a smile. “You’re going to do great things with your life, Jason.”

He smiled softly. “I hope so, eventually.”

* * *

Nora sped down the Wyoming highway once more as they began their road trip back to DC.

“I think this case was worth the zero dollars that we got paid for it,” he told her. “We genuinely did something good and helped people who needed it. Not to mention that we got and actual killer behind bars.”

“I agree,” she replied. “Though, zero dollars might not be entirely accurate.”

He raised his eyebrows. “I thought that Jason couldn’t afford to pay?”

“He couldn’t,” she answered. “But the families of the victims were thankful for our services and pooled together enough to cover our standard fee. They called while you were in the shower this morning.”

Alex smiled. “Doing good things feels great but getting rewarded for said good things feels even better.”

She snorted. “You’re terrible. Like, you aren’t exactly incorrect, but you’re still awful. Now, turn on some music. I’m granting you temporary custody of the aux.”

Plugging the cord into his phone, Alex opened his Spotify app, which was currently logged into Henry’s account, and searched up his own username before pulling up his third favorite playlist: country jams.

As the twang of the banjo started up and Nora audibly groaned, they drove east.


End file.
